THE DAUGHTER 
OF THE STORAGE 

WILUAM DEAN HOWELLS 

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SPECIAL EDITION FOR THE 



OP WASHINGTON, 



D. C. 


THE DAUGHTER 
OF THE STORAGE 




W: Df HOWELLS 



HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
NEW YORK AND LONDON 




T=^3 

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£ 


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Bequest 

Albert Adsit Olemgna 
Aug. 24, 1938 
(Not ^ 


The Daughter of the Storage 

Copyright, 191S, 1916, by Harper & Brothers 
Printed in the United States of America 


F-C 


V 



THE DAUGHTER OF 
THE STORAGE 


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I 

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THE DAUGHTER OF 
THE STORAGE 


I 

^HEY were getting some of their things out to 
^ send into the country, and Forsyth had left 
his work to help his wife look them over and decide 
which to take and which to leave. The things 
were mostly trunks that they had stored the fall 
before; there were some tables and Colonial 
bureaus inherited from his mother, and some mir¬ 
rors and decorative odds and ends, which they 
would not want in the furnished house they had 
taken for the summer. There were some canvases 
which Forsyth said he would paint out and use 
for other subjects, but which, when he came to 
look at again, he found really not so bad. The 
rest, literally, was nothing but trunks; there were, 
of course, two or three boxes of books. When they 
had been packed closely into the five-dollar room, 
3 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


with the tables and bureaus and mirrors and can¬ 
vases and decorative odds and ends put carefully 
on top, the Forsyths thought the effect very neat, 
and laughed at themselves for being proud of it. 

They spent the winter in Paris planning for the 
summer in America, and now it had come May, a 
month which in New York is at its best, and in 
the Constitutional Storage Safe-Deposit Ware¬ 
house is by no means at its worst. The Constitu¬ 
tional Storage is no longer new, but when the 
Forsyths were among the first to store there it 
was up to the latest moment in the modern per¬ 
fections of a safe-deposit warehouse. It was 
strictly fire-proof; and its long, white, brick-walled, 
iron-doored corridors, with their clean concrete 
floors, branching from a central avenue to the tall 
windows north and south, offered perspectives 
sculpturesquely bare, or picturesquely heaped 
with arriving or departing household stuff. 

When the Forsyths went to look at it a nice 
young fellow from the office had gone with them; 
running ahead and switching on rows of electrics 
down the corridors, and then, with a wire-basketed 
electric lamp, which he twirled about and held 
aloft and alow, showing the dustless, sweet¬ 
smelling spaciousness of a perfect five-dollar room. 
He said it would more than hold their things; 
and it really held them. 

4 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 

Now, when the same young fellow unlocked the 
iron door and set it wide, he said he would get 
them a man, and he got Mrs. Forsyth a gilt arm¬ 
chair from some furniture going into an adjoining 
twenty-dollar room. She sat down in it, and ‘ ‘ Of 
course,” she said, “the pieces I want will be at 
the very back and the very bottom. Why don’t 
you get yourself a chair, too, Ambrose? What 
are you looking at?” 

With his eyes on the neighboring furniture he 
answered, “Seems to be the wreck of a million¬ 
aire’s happy home; parlor and kitchen utensils 
and office furniture all in white and gold.” 

“Horrors, yes!” Mrs. Forsyth said, without 
turning her head from studying her trunks, as 
if she might divine their contents from their 
outside. 

“Tata and I,” her husband said, “are more 
interested in the millionaire’s things.” Tata, it 
appeared, was not a dog, but a child; the name 
was not the diminutive of her own name, which 
was Charlotte, but a generic name for a doll, which 
Tata had learned from her Italian nurse to apply 
to all little girls and had got applied to herself 
by her father. She was now at a distance down 
the corridor, playing a drama with the pieces of 
millionaire furniture; as they stretched away in 
variety and splendor they naturally suggested 
5 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


personages of princely quality, and being touched 
with her little forefinger tip were capable of enter¬ 
ing warmly into Tata’s plans for them. 

Her mother looked over her shoulder toward 
the child. “Come here, Tata,” she called, and 
when Tata, having enjoined some tall mirrors to 
secrecy with a frown and a shake of the head, ran 
to her, Mrs. Forsyth had forgotten why she had 
called her. “Oh!” she said, recollecting, “do you 
know which your trunk is, Tata? Can you show 
mamma? Can you put your hand on it ?” 

The child promptly put her hand on the end of a 
small box just within her tiptoe reach, and her 
mother said, “I do believe she knows everything 
that’s in it, Ambrose! That trunk has got to be 
opened the very first one!” 

The man that the young fellow said he would 
send showed at the far end of the corridor, smaller 
than human, but enlarging himself to the average 
Irish bulk as he drew near. He was given in¬ 
structions and obeyed with caressing irony Mrs. 
Forsyth’s order to pull out Tata’s trunk first, and 
she found the key in a large tangle of keys, and 
opened it, and had the joy of seeing everything 
recognized by the owner: doll by doll, cook-stove, 
tin dishes, small brooms, wooden animals on feet 
and wheels, birds of various plumage, a toy piano, 
a dust-pan, alphabet blocks, dog’s-eared linen 
6 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


Mother Goose books, and the rest. Tata had been 
allowed to put the things away herself, and she 
took them out with no apparent sense of the time 
passed since she saw them last. In the changing 
life of her parents all times and places were alike 
to her. She began to play with the things in the 
storage corridor as if it were yesterday when she 
saw them last in the flat. Her mother and father 
left her to them in the distraction of their own 
trunks. Mrs. Forsyth had these spread over the 
space toward the window and their lids lifted and 
tried to decide about them. In the end she had 
changed the things in them back and forth till she 
candidly owned that she no longer knew where 
anything at all was. 

As she raised herself for a moment’s respite 
from the problem she saw at the far end of the 
corridor a lady with two men, who increased in 
size like her own man as they approached. The 
lady herself seemed to “decrease, though she re¬ 
mained of a magnificence to match the furniture, 
and looked like it as to her dress of white picked 
out in gold when she arrived at the twenty-dollar 
room next the Forsyths’. In her advance she had 
been vividly played round by a little boy, who 
ran forward and back and easily doubled the 
length of the corridor before he came to a stand 
and remained with his brown eyes fixed on Tata. 

7 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


Tata herself had blue eyes, which now hovered 
dreamily above the things in her trunk. 

The two mothers began politely to ignore each 
other. She of the twenty-dollar room directed the 
men who had come with her, and in a voice of 
authority and appeal at once commanded and 
consulted them in the disposition of her belongings. 
At the sound of the mixed tones Mrs. Forsyth 
signaled to her husband, and, when he came within 
whispering, murmured: “Pittsburg, or Chicago. 
Did you ever hear such a Mid-Western accent!’' 
She pretended to be asking him about repacking 
the trunk before her, but the other woman was not 
deceived. She was at least aware of criticism in 
the air of her neighbors, and she put on greater 
severity with the workmen. The boy came up and 
caught her skirt. “What?” she said, bending 
over. “No, certainly *not. I haven’t time to 
attend to you. Go off and play. Don’t I tell 
you no? Well, there, then! Will you get that 
trunk out where I can open it? That small one 
there,” she said to one of the men, while the other 
rested for both. She stooped to unlock the trunk 
and flung up the lid. “ Now if you bother me any 
more I will surely—” But she lost herself short 
of the threat and began again to seek counsel and 
issue orders. 

The boy fell upon the things in the trunk, which 
8 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


were the things of a boy, as those in Tata’s trunk 
were the things of a girl, and to run with them, 
one after another, to Tata and to pile them in gift 
on the floor beside her trunk. He did not stop 
running back and forth as fast as his short, fat 
legs could carry him till he had reached the bottom 
of his box, chattering constantly and taking no 
note of the effect with Tata. Then, as she made 
no response whatever to his munificence, he began 
to be abashed and to look pathetically from her to 
her father, 

“Oh, really, young man,” Forsyth said, “we 
can’t let you impoverish yourself at this rate. 
What have you said to your benefactor, Tata? 
What are you going to give him?'* 

The children did not understand his large 
words, but they knew he was affectionately mock¬ 
ing them. 

“Ambrose,” Mrs. Forsyth said, “you mustn’t 
let him.” 

“I’m trying to think how to hinder him, but it’s 
rather late,” Forsyth answered, and then the 
boy’s mother joined in. 

“Indeed, indeed, if you can, it’s more than I 
can. You’re just worrying the little girl,” she said 
to the boy. 

“Oh no, he isn’t, dear little soul,” Mrs. Forsyth 
said, leaving her chair and going up to the two 
9 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 

children. She took the boy’s hand in hers. 
“What a kind boy! But you know my little girl 
mustn’t take all your playthings. If you’ll give 
her one she’ll give you one, and that will be 
enough. You can both play with them all for 
the present.” She referred her suggestion to the 
boy’s mother, and the two ladies met at the 
invisible line dividing the five-dollar room from 
the twenty-dollar room. 

“Oh yes, indeed,” the Mid-Westerner said, 
willing to meet the New-Yorker half-way. ‘ ‘ You’re 
taking things out, I see. I hardly know which 
is the worst: taking out or putting in.” 

“Well, we are just completing the experience,” 
Mrs. Forsyth said. “I shall be able to say better 
how I feel in half an hour.” 

“You don’t mean this is the first time you’ve 
stored? I suppose we've been in and out of 
storage twenty times. Not in this warehouse 
exactly; we’ve never been here before.” 

“It seems very nice,” Mrs. Forsyth suggested. 

“They all do at the beginning. I suppose if 
we ever came to the end they would seem nicer 
still. Mr. Bream’s business is always taking him 
away” (it appeared almost instantly that he was 
the international inspector of a great insurance 
company’s agencies in Europe and South America), 
“and when I don’t go with him it seems easier 

lO 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 

to break up and go into a hotel than to go on 
housekeeping. I don’t know that it is, though,” 
she questioned. “It’s so hard to know what to 
do with the child in a hotel.” 

“Yes, but he seems the sort that you could 
manage with anywhere,” Mrs. Forsyth agreed 
and disagreed. 

His mother looked at him where he stood beam¬ 
ing upon Tata and again joyfully awaiting some 
effect with her. But the child sat back upon her 
small heels with her eyes fixed on the things in 
her trunk and made no sign of having seen the 
heaps of his gifts. 

The Forsyths had said to each other before this 
that their little girl was a queer child, and now 
they were not so much ashamed of her apparent 
selfishness or rude indifference as they thought 
they were. They made a joke of it with the boy’s 
mother, who said she did not believe Tata was 
anything but shy. She said she often told Mr. 
Bream that she did wish Peter—yes, that was his 
name; she didn’t like it much, but it was his 
grandfather’s; was Tata a Christian name? Oh, 
just a pet name! Well, it was pretty—could be 
broken of his ridiculous habit; most children— 
little boys, that was—^held onto their things so. 

Forsyth would have taken something from 
Tata and given it to Peter; but his wife would 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


not let him; and he had to content himself with 
giving Peter a pencil of his own that drew red 
at one end and blue at the other, and that at 
once drew a blue boy, that looked like Peter, on 
the pavement. He told Peter not to draw a boy 
now, but wait till he got home, and then be care¬ 
ful not to draw a blue boy with the red end. He 
helped him put his things back into his trunk, 
and Peter seemed to enjoy that, too. 

Tata, without rising from her seat on her heels, 
watched the restitution with her dreamy eyes; 
she paid no attention to the blue boy on the pave¬ 
ment; pictures from her father were nothing new 
to her. The mothers parted with expressions of 
mutual esteem in spite of their difference of accent 
and fortune. Mrs. Forsyth asked if she might 
not kiss Peter, and did so; he ran to his mother 
and whispered to her; then he ran back and 
gave Tata so great a hug that she fell over 
from it. 

Tata did not cry, but continued as if lost in 
thought which she could not break from, and that 
night, after she had said her prayers with her 
mother, her mother thought it was time to ask 
her: “Tata, dear, why did you act so to that 
boy to-day? Why didn’t you give him some¬ 
thing of yours when he brought you all his things? 
Why did you act so oddly?” 

12 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 

Tata said something in a voice so low that her 
mother could not make it out. 

“What did you say?” 

“I couldn’t tell which,” the child still whis¬ 
pered; but now her mother’s ear was at her 
lips. 

“How, which?” 

“To give him. The more I looked,” and the 
whisper became a quivering breath, “the more I 
couldn’t tell which. And I wanted to give them 
all to him, but I couldn’t tell whether it would be 
right, because you and papa gave them to me for 
birthday and Christmas,” and the quivering 
breath broke into a sobbing grief, so that the 
mother had to catch the child up to her heart. 

“Dear little tender conscience!” she said, still 
wiping her eyes when she told the child’s father, 
and they fell into a sweet, serious talk about her 
before they slept. “And I was ashamed of her 
before that woman! I know she misjudged her; 
but we ought to have remembered how fine and 
precious she is, and known how she must have 
suffered, trying to decide.” 

“Yes, conscience,” the father said. “And tem¬ 
perament, the temperament to which decision is 
martyrdom.” 

“And she will always have to be deciding! 
She’ll have to decide for you, some day, as I 
13 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 

do now; you are very undecided, Ambrose—she 
gets it from you.” 


II 

The Forsyths were afraid that Tata might want 
to offer Peter some gift in reparation the next 
morning, and her father was quite ready, if she 
said so, to put off their leaving town, and go with 
her to the Constitutional Storage, which was the 
only address of Mrs. Bream that he knew. But 
the child had either forgotten or she was contented 
with her mother’s comforting, and no longer felt 
remorse. 

One does not store the least of one’s personal 
or household gear without giving a hostage to 
storage, a pledge of allegiance impossible to break. 
No matter how few things one puts in, one never 
takes everything out; one puts more things in. 
Mrs. Forsyth went to the warehouse with Tata 
in the fall before they sailed for another winter 
in Paris, and added some old bits she had picked 
up at farm-houses in their country drives, and 
they filled the room quite to the top. She told 
her husband how Tata had entered into the spirit 
of putting back her trunk of playthings with the 
hope of seeing it again in the spring; and she 
added that she had now had to take a seven-fifty 
14 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


room without consulting him, or else throw away 
the things they had brought home. 

During the ten or twelve years that followed, 
the Forsyths sometimes spent a whole winter in 
a hotel; sometimes they had a flat; sometimes 
they had a separate dwelling. If their housing was 
ample, they took almost everything out of stor¬ 
age; once they got down to a two-dollar bin, and 
it seemed as if they really were leaving the stor¬ 
age altogether. Then, if they went into a flat 
that was nearly all studio, their furniture went 
back in a cataclysmal wave to the warehouse, 
where a ten-dollar room, a twelve-dollar room, 
would not dam the overflow. 

Tata, who had now outgrown her pet name, 
and was called Charlotte because her mother 
felt she ought to be, always went with her to the 
storage to help look the things over, to see the 
rooms emptied down to a few boxes, or replenished 
to bursting. In the first years she played about, 
close to her mother; as she grew older she ven¬ 
tured further, and began to make friends with 
other little girls who had come with their mothers. 
It was quite safe socially to be in the Constitu¬ 
tional Storage; it gave standing; and Mrs. 
Forsyth fearlessly chanced acquaintance with these 
mothers, who would sometimes be there whole 
long mornings or afternoons, taking trunks out or 

15 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


putting them in. With the trunks set into the 
corridors and opened for them, they would spend 
the hours looking the contents over, talking to 
their neighbors, or rapt in long silences when 
they hesitated with things held off or up, and, 
after gazing absently at them, putting them back 
again. Sometimes they varied the process by 
laying things aside for sending home, and receipt¬ 
ing for them at the office as “goods selected.” 

They were mostly hotel people or apartment 
people, as Mrs. Forsyth oftenest was herself, but 
sometimes they were separate - house people. 
Among these there was one family, not of great 
rank or wealth, but distinguished, as lifelong New- 
Yorkers, in a world of comers and goers of every 
origin. Mrs. Forsyth especially liked them for a 
certain quality, but what this quality was she 
could not very well say. They were a mother 
with two daughters, not quite old maids, but on 
the way to it, and there was very intermittently 
the apparently bachelor brother of the girls; at 
the office Mrs. Forsyth verified her conjecture 
that he was some sort of minister. One could 
see they were all gentlefolks, though the girls 
were not of the last cry of fashion. They were 
very nice to their mother, and you could tell that 
they must have been coming with her for years. 

At this point in her study of them for her 

i6 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


husband’s amusement she realized that Charlotte 
had been coming to the storage with her nearly 
all her life, and that more and more the child had 
taken charge of the uneventual inspection of the 
things. She was shocked to think that she had 
let this happen, and now she commanded her 
husband to say whether Charlotte would grow 
into a storage old maid like those good girls. 

Forsyth said. Probably not before her time; but 
he allowed it was a point to be considered. 

Very well, then, Mrs. Forsyth said, the child 
should never go again; that was all. She had 
strongly confirmed herself in this resolution when 
one day she not only let the child go again, but 
she let her go alone. The child was now between 
seventeen and eighteen, rather tall, grave, pretty, 
with the dull brown hair that goes so well with 
dreaming blue eyes, and of a stiff grace. She 
had not come out yet, because she had always 
been out, handing cakes at her father’s studio 
teas long before she could remember not doing it, 
and later pouring for her mother with rather a 
quelling air as she got toward fifteen. During 
these years the family had been going and com¬ 
ing between Europe and America; they did not 
know perfectly why, except that it was easier 
than not. 

More and more there was a peculiarity in the 

2 17 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


goods selected by Charlotte for sending home, 
which her mother one day noted. “How is it, 
Charlotte, that you always send exactly the 
things I want, and when you get your own things 
here you don’t know whether they are what you 
wanted or not?” 

“Because I don’t know when I send them. I 
don’t choose them; I can’t.” 

“But you choose the right things for me?” 

“No, I don’t, mother. I just take what comes 
first, and you always like it.” 

“Now, that is nonsense, Charlotte. I can’t 
have you telling me such a thing as that. It’s 
an insult to my intelligence. Do you think I 
don’t know my own mind?” ^ 

“I don’t know my mind,” the girl said, so per¬ 
sistently, obstinately, stubbornly, that her mother 
did not pursue the subject for fear of worse. 

She referred it to her husband, who said: “Per¬ 
haps it’s like poets never being able to remember 
their own poetry. I’ve heard it’s because they 
have several versions in their minds when they 
write and can’t remember which they’ve written. 
Charlotte has several choices in her mind, and 
can’t choose between her choices.” 

“Well, we ought to have broken her of her 
indecision. Some day it will make her very 
unhappy.” 

i8 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 

“Pretty hard to break a person of her tem¬ 
perament,” Forsyth suggested. 

“I know it!” his wife admitted, with a certain 
pleasure in realizing the fact. “I don’t know 
what we shall do.” 


Ill 

Storage society was almost wholly feminine; in 
rare instances there was a man who must have 
been sent in dearth of women or in an hour of 
their disability. Then the man came hastily, 
with a porter, and either pulled all the things 
out of the rooms so that he could honestly say 
he 'had seen them, and that the thing wanted 
was not there; or else merely had the doors 
opened, and after a glance inside resolved to wait 
till his wife, or mother, or daughter could come. 
He agreed in guilty eagerness with the workmen 
that this was the only way. 

The exception to the general rule was a young 
man who came one bright spring morning when all 
nature suggested getting one’s stuff out and going 
into the country, and had the room next the 
Forsyths’ original five-dollar room opened. As 
it happened, Charlotte was at the moment visit¬ 
ing this room upon her mother’s charge to see 
whether certain old scrim sash-curtains, which 

19 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


they had not needed for ages but at last simply 
must have, were not lurking there in a chest of 
general curtainings. The Forsyths now had 
rooms on other floors, but their main room was 
at the end of the corridor branching northward 
from that where the five-dollar room was. Near 
this main room that nice New York family had 
their rooms, and Charlotte had begun the morning 
in their friendly neighborhood, going through some 
chests that might perhaps have the general cur¬ 
tainings in them and the scrim curtains among the 
rest. It had not, and she had gone to what the 
Forsyths called their old ancestral five-dollar 
room, where that New York family continued to 
project a sort of wireless chaperonage over her. 
But the young man had come with a porter, and, 
with her own porter, Charlotte could not feel that 
even a wireless chaperonage was needed, though 
the young man approached with the most beam¬ 
ing face she thought she had ever seen, and 
said he hoped he should not be in her way. She 
answered with a sort of helpless reverberation 
of his glow. Not at all; she should only be a 
moment. She wanted to say she hoped she 
would not be in his way, but she saved herself 
in time, while, with her own eyes intent upon 
the fagade of her room and her mind trying to 
lose itself in the question which curtain-trunk 
20 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


the scrims might be in, she kept the sense of his 
sweet eyes, the merriest eyes she had ever seen, 
effulgent with good-will and apology and rever¬ 
ent admiration. She blushed to think it admira¬ 
tion, though she liked to think it so, and she did 
not snub him when the young man jumped about, 
neglecting his own storage, and divining the right 
moments for his offers of help. She saw that he 
was a little shorter than herself, that he was very 
light and quick on his feet, and had a round, 
brown face, clean-shaven, and a round, brown 
head, close shorn, from which in the zeal of his 
attentions to her he had shed his straw hat onto 
the window-sill. He formed a strong contrast to 
the contents of his store-room, which was full, 
mainly, of massive white furniture picked out in 
gold, and very blond. He said casually that it had 
been there, off and on, since long before he could 
remember, and at these words an impression, 
vague, inexplicable, deepened in Charlotte’s 
mind. 

‘^Mother,” she said, for she had now disused 
the earlier “mamma” in deference to modern 
usage, “how old was I when we first took that 
five-dollar room?” 

She asked this question after she had shown the 
scrim curtains she had found and brought home 
with her. 


21 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


“Why? I don’t know. Two or three; three 
or four. I should have to count up. What makes 
you ask?” 

“Can a person recollect what happened when 
they were three or four?” 

“I should say not, decidedly.” 

“Or recollect a face?” 

“Certainly not.” 

“Then of course it wasn’t. Mother, do you 
remember ever telling me what the little boy was 
like who gave me all his playthings and I couldn’t 
decide what to give him back?” 

“What a question! Of course not! He was 
very brown and funny, with the beamingest little 
face in the world. Rather short for his age, I 
should say, though I haven’t the least idea what 
his age was.” 

“Then it was the very same little boy!” Char¬ 
lotte said. 

“Who was the very same little boy?” her 
mother demanded. 

“The one that was there to-day; the young 
man, I mean,” Charlotte explained, and then she 
told what had happened with a want of fullness 
which her mother’s imagination supplied. 

“Did he say who he was? Is he coming back 
to-morrow or this afternoon? Did you inquire 
who he was or where?” 


22 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


“What an idea, mother!” Charlotte said, group¬ 
ing the several impossibilities under one head in 
her answer. 

“You had a perfect right to know, if you thought 
he was the one.” 

“But I didn’t think he was the one, and I don’t 
know that he is now; and if he was, what could 
I do about it?” 

“That is true,” Mrs. Forsyth owned. “But 
it’s very disappointing. I’ve always felt as if 
they ought to know it was your undecidedness 
and not ungenerousness.” 

Charlotte laughed a little forlornly, but she 
only said, “Really, mother!” 

Mrs. Forsyth was still looking at the curtains. 
“Well, these are not the scrims I wanted. You 
must go back. I believe I will go with you. 
The sooner we have it over the better,” she added, 
and she left the undecided Charlotte to decide 
whether she meant the scrim curtains or the young 
man’s identity. 

It was very well, for one reason, that she de¬ 
cided to go with Charlotte that afternoon. The 
New-Yorkers must have completed the inspection 
of their trunks, for they had not come back. Their 
failure to do so was the more important because 
the young man had come back and was actively 
superintending the unpacking of his room. The 

23 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


palatial furniture had all been ranged up and 
down the corridor, and as fast as a trunk was got 
out and unlocked he went through it with the 
help of the storage-men, listed its contents in a 
note-book with a number, and then transferred 
the number and a synopsis of the record to a tag 
and fastened it to the trunk, which he had put 
back into the room. 

When the Forsyths arrived with the mistaken 
scrim curtains, he interrupted himself with apolo¬ 
gies for possibly being in their way; and when 
Mrs. Forsyth said he was not at all in their way, 
he got white-and-gold arm-chairs for her and 
Charlotte and put them so conveniently near the 
old ancestral room that Mrs. Forsyth scarcely 
needed to move hand or foot in letting Charlotte 
restore the wrong curtains and search the chests 
for the right ones. His politeness made way for 
conversation and for the almost instant exchange 
of confidences between himself and Mrs. Forsyth, 
so that Charlotte was free to enjoy the silence 
to which they left her in her labors. 

“Before I say a word,” Mrs. Forsyth said, 
after saying some hundreds in their mutual in¬ 
culpation and exculpation, “I want to ask some¬ 
thing, and I hope you will excuse it to an old 
woman’s curiosity and not think it rude.” 

At the words “old woman’s” the young man 
24 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


gave a protesting “Oh!” and at the word “rude” 
he said, “Not at all.” 

“It is simply this: how long have your things 
been here? I ask because we’ve had this room 
thirteen or fourteen years, and I’ve never seen 
your room opened in that whole time.” 

The young man laughed joyously. “Because 
it hasn’t been opened in that whole time. I was 
a little chap of three or four bothering round here 
when my mother put the things in; I believe it 
was a great frolic for me, but I’m afraid it wasn’t 
for her. I’ve been told that my activities con¬ 
tributed to the confusion of the things and the 
things in them that she’s been in ever since, and 
I’m here now to make what reparation I can by 
listing them.” 

“She’ll find it a great blessing,” Mrs. Forsyth 
said. ‘ ‘ I wish we had ours listed. I suppose you 
remember it all very vividly. It must have been 
a great occasion for you seeing the things stored 
at that age.” 

The young man beamed upon her. “Not so 
great as now, I’m afraid. The fact is, I don’t 
remember anything about it. But I’ve been told 
that I embarrassed with my personal riches a 
little girl who was looking over her doll’s things.” 

“Oh, indeed!” Mrs. Forsyth said, stiffly, and 
she turned rather snubbingly from him and said, 

25 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


coldly, to Charlotte: “I think they are in that 
green trunk. Have you the key?” and, stooping 
as her daughter stooped, she whispered, “Really!” 
in condemnation and contempt. 

Charlotte showed no signs of sharing either, 
and Mrs. Forsyth could not very well manage 
them alone. So when Charlotte said, “No, I 
haven’t the key, mother,” and the young man 
burst in with, “Oh, do let me try my master- 
key; it will unlock anything that isn’t a Yale,” 
Mrs. Forsyth sank back enthroned and the 
trunk was thrown open. 

She then forgot what she had wanted it opened 
for. Charlotte said, “They’re not here, mother,” 
and her mother said, “No, I didn’t suppose they 
were,” and began to ask the young man about 
his mother. It appeared that his father had died 
twelve years before, and since then his mother 
and he had been nearly everywhere except at 
home, though mostly in England; now they had 
come home to see where they should go next or 
whether they should stay. 

“That would never suit my daughter,” Mrs. 
Forsyth lugged in, partly because the talk had 
gone on away from her family as long as she 
could endure, and partly because Charlotte’s in¬ 
decision always amused her. “She can’t bear 
to choose.” 


26 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


“Really?” the young man said. “I don’t 
know whether I like it or not, but I have had to 
do a lot of it. You mustn’t think, though, that 
I chose this magnificent furniture. My father 
bought an Italian palace once, and as we couln’t 
live in it or move it we brought the furniture 
here.” 

“It is magnificent,” Mrs. Forsyth said, look¬ 
ing down the long stretches of it and eying and 
fingering her specific throne. “I wish my hus¬ 
band could see it—I don’t believe he remembers 
it from fourteen years ago. It looks—excuse me! 
—very studio.” 

“ Is he a painter ? Not Mr. Forsyth the painter ?” 

“Yes,” Mrs. Forsyth eagerly admitted, but 
wondering how he should know her name, with¬ 
out reflecting that a score of trunk-tags proclaimed 
it and that she had acquired his by like means. 

‘ ‘ I like his things so much, ’ ’ he said. ‘ ‘ I thought 
his three portraits were the best things in the 
Salon last year.” 

“Oh, you saw them?” Mrs. Forsyth laughed 
with pleasure and pride. “Then,” as if it neces¬ 
sarily followed, “you must come to us some 
Sunday afternoon. You’ll find a number of his 
new portraits and some of the subjects; they 
like to see themselves framed.” She tried for 
a card in her hand-bag, but she had none, and she 
27 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


said, '‘Have you one of my cards, my dear?’' 
Charlotte had, and rendered it up with a severity 
lost upon her for the moment. She held it tow¬ 
ard him. “It’s Mr. Peter Bream?” she smiled 
upon him, and he beamed back. 

“Did you remember it from our first meeting?” 

In their cab Mrs. Forsyth said, “I don’t know 
whether he’s what you call rather fresh or not, 
Charlotte, and I’m not sure that I’ve been very 
wise. But he is so nice, and he looked so glad to 
be asked.” 

Charlotte did not reply at once, and her silent 
severity came to the surface of her mother’s con¬ 
sciousness so painfully that it was rather a relief 
to have her explode, “Mother, I will thank you 
not to discuss my temperament with people.” 

She gave Mrs. Forsyth her chance, and her 
mother was so happy in being able to say, “I 
won’t—your tempery my dear,” that she could add 
with sincere apology: “I’m sorry I vexed you, 
and I won’t do it again.” 

IV 

The next day was Sunday; Peter Bream took 
it for some Sunday, and came to the tea on Mrs. 
Forsyth’s generalized invitation. She pulled her 
mouth down and her eyebrows up when his card 
28 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 

was brought in, but as he followed hard she made 
a lightning change to a smile and gave him a hand 
of cordial welcome. Charlotte had no choice but 
to welcome him, too, and so the matter was simple 
for her. She was pouring, as usual, for her 
mother, who liked to eliminate herself from set 
duties and walk round among the actual portraits 
in fact and in frame and talk about them to the 
potential portraits. Peter, qualified by long so¬ 
journ in England, at once pressed himself into the 
service of handing about the curate’s assistant; 
Mrs. Forsyth electrically explained that it was 
one of the first brought to New York, and that 
she had got it at the Stores in London fifteen years 
before, and it had often been in the old ancestral 
room, and was there on top of the trunks that 
first day. She did not recur to the famous in¬ 
stance of Charlotte’s infant indecision, and Peter 
was safe from a snub when he sat down by the 
girl’s side and began to make her laugh. At the 
end, when her mother asked Charlotte what they 
had been laughing.about, she could not tell; she 
said she did not know they were laughing. 

The next morning Mrs. Forsyth was paying for 
her Sunday tea with a Monday headache, and 
more things must be got out for the country. 
Charlotte had again no choice but to go alone 
to the' storage, and yet again no choice but to be 
29 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


pleasant to Peter when she found him next door 
listing the contents of his mother’s trunks and 
tagging them as before. He dropped his work 
and wanted to help her. Suddenly they seemed 
strangely well acquainted, and he pretended to 
be asked which pieces she should put aside as 
goods selected, and chose them for her. She hinted 
that he was shirking his own work; he said it 
was an all-summer’s job, but he knew her mother 
was in a hurry. He found the little old trunk 
of her playthings, and got it down and opened it 
and took out some toys as goods selected. She 
made him put them back, but first he catalogued 
everything in it and synopsized the list on a tag 
and tagged the trunk. He begged for a broken doll 
which he had not listed, and Charlotte had so much 
of her original childish difficulty in parting with 
that instead of something else that she refused it. 

It came lunch-time, and he invited her to go 
out to lunch with him; and when she declined 
with dignity he argued that if they went to the 
Woman’s Exchange she would be properly chap¬ 
eroned by the genius of the place; besides, it 
was the only place in town where you got real 
strawberry shortcake. She was ashamed of liking 
it all; he besought her to let him carry her hand¬ 
bag for her, and, as he already had it, she could 
not prevent him; she did not know, really, how 

30 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 

far she might successfully forbid him in anything. 
At the street door of the apartment-house they 
found her mother getting out of a cab, and she 
asked Peter in to lunch; so that Charlotte might 
as well have lunched with him at the Woman’s 
Exchange. 

At all storage warehouses there is a season in 
autumn when the corridors are heaped with the 
incoming furniture of people who have decided 
that they cannot pass another winter in New 
York and are breaking up housekeeping to go 
abroad indefinitely. But in the spring, when the 
Constitutional Safe-Deposit offered ample space 
for thoughtful research, the meetings of Charlotte 
and Peter could recur without more conscious¬ 
ness of the advance they were making toward the 
fated issue than in so many encounters at tea 
or luncheon or dinner. Mrs. Forsyth was insist¬ 
ing on rather a drastic overhauling of her stor¬ 
age that year. Some of the things, by her com¬ 
mand, were shifted to and fro between the more 
modem rooms and the old ancestral room, and 
Charlotte had to verify the removals. In decid¬ 
ing upon goods selected for the country she had 
the help of Peter, and she helped him by inter¬ 
posing some useful hesitations in the case of things 
he had put aside from his mother’s possessions to 
be sold for her by the warehouse people. 

31 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


One day he came late and told Charlotte that 
his mother had suddenly taken her passage for 
England, and they were sailing the next morning. 
He said, as if it logically followed, that he had 
been in love with her from that earliest time 
when she would not give him the least of her 
possessions, and now he asked her if she would 
not promise him the greatest. She did not like 
what she felt '‘rehearsed” in his proposal; it was 
not her idea of a proposal, which ought to be 
spontaneous and unpremeditated in terms; at 
’the same time, she resented his precipitation, 
which she could not deny was inevitable. 

She perceived that they were sitting side by 
side on two of those white-and-gold thrones, and 
she summoned an indignation with the absurdity 
in refusing him. She rose and said that she must 
go; that she must be going; that it was quite 
time for her to go; and she would not let him 
follow her to the elevator, as he made some offer 
of doing, but left him standing among his palatial 
furniture like a prince in exile. 

By the time she reached home she had been 
able to decide that she must tell her mother at 
once. Her mother received the fact of Peter’s 
proposal with such transport that she did not 
realize the fact of Charlotte’s refusal. When this 
was connoted to her she could scarcely keep her 
32 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 

temper within the bounds of maternal tenderness. 
She said she would have nothing more to do with 
such a girl; that there was but one such pearl as 
Peter in the universe, and for Charlotte to throw 
him away like that! Was it because she could 
not decide? Well, it appeared that she could 
decide wrong quickly enough when it came to the 
point. Would she leave it now to her mother? 

That Charlotte would not do, but what she did 
do was to write a letter to Peter taking him back 
as much as rested with her; but delaying so long 
in posting it, when it was written, that it reached 
him among the letters sent on board and sup- 
plementarily delivered by his room steward after 
all the others when the ship had sailed. The best 
Peter could do in response was a jubilant Mar- 
conigram of unequaled cost and comprehensiveness. 

His mother had meant to return in the fall, 
after her custom, to find out whether she wished 
to spend the winter in New York or not. Before 
the date for her sailing she fell sick, and Peter 
came sadly home alone in the spring. Mrs. Bream’s 
death brought Mrs. Forsyth a vain regret; she 
was sorry now that she had seen so little of 
Mrs. Bream; Peter’s affection for her was beau¬ 
tiful and spoke worlds for both of them; and they, 
the Forsyths, must do what they could to com¬ 
fort him. 

3 


33 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


Charlotte felt the pathos of his case peculiarly 
when she went to make provision for goods se¬ 
lected for the summer from the old ancestral 
room, and found him forlorn among his white- 
and-gold furniture next door. He complained 
that he had no association with it except the touch¬ 
ing fact of his mother’s helplessness with it, which 
he had now inherited. The contents of the 
trunks were even less intimately of his experience; 
he had performed a filial duty in listing their 
contents, which long antedated him, and con¬ 
sisted mostly of palatial bric-a-brac and the varied 
spoils of travel. 

He cheered up, however, in proposing to her 
that they should buy a Castle in Spain and put 
them into it. The fancy pleased her, but visibly 
she shrank from a step which it involved, so that 
he was, as it were, forced to say, half jokingly, 
half ruefully, ‘T can imagine your not caring for 
this rubbish or what became of it, Charlotte, but 
what about the owner?” 

“The owner?” she asked, as it were somnam- 
bulantly. 

“Yes. Marrying him, say, sometime soon.” 

“Oh, Peter, I couldn’t.” 

“Couldn’t? You know that’s not playing the 
game exactly.” 

“Yes; but not—not right away?” 

34 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 

*‘Well, I don’t know much about it in my own 
case, but isn’t it usual to fix some approximate 
date? When should you think?” 

“Oh, Peter, I can't think.” 

“Will you let me fix it? I must go West and 
sell out and pull up, you know, preparatory to 
never going again. We can fix the day now or 
we can fix it when I come back.” 

“Oh, when you come back,” she entreated so 
eagerly that Peter said: 

“Charlotte, let me ask you one thing. Were 
you ever sorry you wrote me that taking-back 
letter?” 

“Why, Peter, you know how I am. When I 
have decided something I have undecided it. 
That’s all.” 

From gay he turned to grave. “I ought to 
have thought. I haven’t been fair; I haven’t 
played the game. I ought to have given you 
another chance; and I haven’t, have I?” 

“Why, I suppose a girl can always change,” 
Charlotte said, suggestively. 

“Yes, but you won’t always be a girl. I’ve 
never asked you if you wanted to change. I ask 
you now. Do you?” 

“How can I tell? Hadn’t we better let it go 
as it is? Only not hurry about—about—marry¬ 
ing?” 


35 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 

‘‘Certainly not hurry about marrying. I’ve 
wondered that a girl could make up her mind to 
marry any given man. Haven’t you ever wished 
that you had not made up your mind about me?” 

“Hundreds of times. But I don’t know that 
I meant anything by it.” 

He took her hand from where it lay in her lap 
as again she sat on one of the white-and-gold 
thrones beside him and gently pressed it. “Well, 
then, let’s play we have never been engaged. I’m 
going West to-night to settle things up for good, 
and I won’t be back for' three or four months, 
and when I come back we’ll start new. I’ll ask 
you, and you shall say yes or no just as if you 
had never said either before.” 

“Peter, when you talk like that!” She saw his 
brown, round face dimly through her wet eyes, 
and she wanted to hug him for pity of him and 
pride in him, but she could not decide to do it. 
They went out to lunch at the Woman’s Exchange, 
and the only regret Peter had was that it was so 
long past the season of strawberry shortcake, and 
that Charlotte seemed neither to talk nor to 
listen; she ought to have done one or the other. 

They had left the Vaneckens busy with their 
summer trunks at the far end of the northward 
corridor, where their wireless station had been 
re-established for Charlotte’s advantage, though 
36 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


she had not thought of it the whole short morn¬ 
ing long. When she came back from lunch the 
Vaneckens were just brushing away the crumbs 
of theirs, which the son and brother seemed to 
have brought in for them in a paper box; at 
any rate, he was now there, making believe to 
help them. 

Mrs. Forsyth had promised to come, but she 
came so late in the afternoon that she owned she 
had been grudgingly admitted at the office, and 
she was rather indignant about it. By this time, 
without having been West for three months, Peter 
had asked a question which had apparently never 
been asked before, and Charlotte had as newly 
answered it. “And now, mother,” she said, 
while Mrs. Forsyth passed from indignant to 
exultant, “I want to be married right away, be¬ 
fore Peter changes his mind about taking me West 
with him. Let us go home at once. You always 
said I should have a home wedding.” 

“What a ridiculous idea!” Mrs. Forsyth said, 
more to gain time than anything else. She added, 
“Everything is at sixes and sevens in the flat. 
There wouldn’t be standing-room.” A sudden 
thought flashed upon her, which, because it was 
sudden and in keeping with her character, she 
put into tentative words. “You’re more at home 
here than anywhere else. You were almost bom 
37 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


here. You’ve played about here ever since you 
were a child. You first met Peter here. He pro¬ 
posed to you here, and you rejected him here. 
He’s proposed here again, and you’ve accepted 
him, you say—” 

“Mother!” Charlotte broke in terribly upon 
her. “Are you suggesting that I should be mar¬ 
ried in a storage warehouse? Well, I haven’t 
fallen quite so low as that yet. If I can’t have a 
home wedding, I will have a church wedding, and 
I will wait till doomsday for it if necessary.” 

“I don’t know about doomsday,” Mrs. For¬ 
syth said, “but as far as to-day is concerned, 
it’s too late for a church wedding. Peter, isn’t 
there something about canonical hours? And 
isn’t it past them?” 

“That’s in the Episcopal Church,” Peter said, 
and then he asked, very politely, “Will you ex¬ 
cuse me for a moment?” and walked away as if 
he had an idea. It was apparently to join the 
Vaneckens, who stood in a group at the end of 
their corridor, watching the restoration of the 
trunks which they had been working over the 
whole day. He came back with Mr. Vanecken 
and Mr. Vanecken’s mother. He was smiling 
radiantly, and they amusedly. 

‘ ‘ It’s all right, ’ ’ he explained. ‘ ‘ Mr. Vanecken is 
a Presbyterian minister, and he will marry us now.” 
38 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


“But not here!” Charlotte cried, feeling herself 
weaken. 

“No, certainly not,” the dominie reassured her. 
' ‘ I know a church in the next block that I can bor¬ 
row for the occasion. B ut what about the license ? ’ ’ 

It was in the day before the parties must ^oth 
make application in person, and Peter took a 
paper from his breast pocket. “I thought it 
might be needed, sometime, and I got it on the 
way up, this morning.” 

“Oh, how thoughtful of you, Peter!” Mrs. 
Forsyth moaned in admiration otherwise inex¬ 
pressible, and the rest laughed, even Charlotte, 
who laughed hysterically. At the end of the cor¬ 
ridor they met the Misses Vanecken waiting for 
them, unobtrusively expectant, and they all went 
down in the elevator together. Just as they were 
leaving the building, which had the air of hurry¬ 
ing them out, Mrs. Forsyth had an inspiration. 
“Good heavens!” she exclaimed, and then, in 
deference to Mr. Vanecken, said, “Good gracious, 
I mean. My husband! Peter, go right into the 
office and telephone Mr. Forsyth.” 

“Perhaps,” Mr. Vanecken said, “I had better 
go and see about having my friend’s church 
opened, in the meanwhile, and—” 

“By all means!” Mrs. Forsyth said from her 
mood of universal approbation. 

39 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 

But Mr. Vanecken came back looking rather 
queer and crestfallen. “I find my friend has 
gone into the country for a few days; and I 
don’t quite like to get the sexton to open the 
church without his authority, and— But New 
York is full of churches, and we can easily find 
another, with a little delay, if—” 

He looked at Peter, who looked at Charlotte, 
who burst out with unprecedented determination. 
“No, we can’t wait. I shall never marry Peter 
if we do. Mother, you are right. But must it 
be in the old ancestral five-dollar room?” 

They all laughed except Charlotte, who was 
more like crying. 

“Certainly not,” Mr. Vanecken said. “I’ve 
no doubt the manager—” 

He never seemed to end his sentences, and he 
now left this one broken off while he penetrated 
the railing which fenced in the manager alone 
among a group of vacated desks, frowning im¬ 
patient. At some murmured words from the 
dominie, he shouted, ''Whatr and then came out 
radiantly smiling, and saying, “Why, certainly.” 
He knew all the group as old storers in the Con¬ 
stitutional, and called them each by name as he 
shook them each by the hand. “Everything else 
has happened here, and I don’t see why this 
shouldn’t. Come right into the reception-room.” 

40 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


With some paintings of biblical subjects, un¬ 
claimed from the storage, on the walls, the place 
had a religious effect, and the manager signifi¬ 
cantly looked out of it a lingering stenographer, 
who was standing before a glass with two hat¬ 
pins crossed in her mouth preparatory to thrust¬ 
ing them through the straw. She withdrew, 
visibly curious and reluctant, and then the man¬ 
ager offered to withdraw himself. 

“No,” Charlotte said, surprisingly initiative in 
these junctures, “I don’t know how it is in Mr. 
Vanecken’s church, but, if father doesn’t come, 
perhaps you’ll have to give me away. At any 
rate, you’re an old friend of the family, and I 
should be hurt if you didn’t stay.” 

She laid her hand on the manager’s arm, and 
just as he had protestingly and politely consented, 
her father arrived in a taxicab, rather grumbling 
from having been obliged to cut short a sitting. 
When it was all over, and the Vaneckens were 
eliminated, when, in fact, the Breams had joined 
the Forsyths at a wedding dinner which the bride’s 
father had given them at Delmonico’s and had 
precipitated themselves into a train for Niagara 
(“So banal,” Mrs. Forsyth said, “but I suppose 
they had to go somewhere, and we went to Niagara, 
come to think of it, and it’s on their way West”), 
the bride’s mother remained up late talking it 
41 


THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE 


all over. She took credit to herself for the whole 
affair, and gave herself a great deal of just praise. 
But when she said, “I do believe, if it hadn’t been 
for me, at the last, Charlotte would never have 
made up her mind,” Forsyth demurred. 

*T should say Peter had a good deal to do with 
making up her mind for her.” 

“Yes, you might say that.” 

“And for once in her life Charlotte seems to 
have had her mind ready for making up.” 

“Yes, you might say that, too. I believe she 
is going to turn out a decided character, after all. 
I never saw anybody so determined not to be mar¬ 
ried in a storage warehouse.” 



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